[gov3009-l] Graif on "The Spatial Embeddedness of Neighborhood Effects"

Hi all, We hope that you can join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop this Wednesday, October 27th when we will be happy to have Corina Graif, a PhD candidate in the Sociology department giving a practice job talk entitled "The Spatial Embeddedness of Neighborhood Effects: Toward a Spatial Understanding of Mental Health and Obesity in the Context of Moving to Opportunity." You will find an abstract below. As always, we will serve a light lunch (Thai) and the talk will begin around 12:15p. "The Spatial Embeddedness of Neighborhood Effects: Toward a Spatial Understanding of Mental Health and Obesity in the Context of Moving to Opportunity" Corina Graif Department of Sociology CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.) Wednesday, October 27th, 12 noon Abstract: This chapter makes the case that locational attainment and neighborhood effects cannot be fully understood outside the larger spatial context within which neighborhoods are embedded. The importance of neighborhood poverty in stifling residents’ physical and mental wellbeing has long been recognized by social scientists and policy makers. While heated debates across the disciplines reignite periodically about the adequate measurement of neighborhoods, this paper breaks away from the aggregation-level dilemma to consider alternative understandings of place and space. Analyses are based on longitudinal data on over 4000 low-income families who participated in the Moving to Opportunity Experiment in five major U.S. cities. The findings support the hypothesis that the spatial context of neighborhoods matters for mental health and obesity. Moreover, they indicate that the environmental factors affecting obesity tend to be more spatially localized while those affecting mental health tend to be spatially expansive. The spatial framework for thinking about neighborhood effects proposed here allows for a more nuanced integration with the differential spatial distributions of resources and disadvantage within and across cities and bears critical implications for reorienting the discussions of locational attainment and neighborhood effects toward a more continuous consideration of the role of space and its interaction with place. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/